WATCH: 9 things to know about New Year's Eve

Alice Coyle acoyle@wickedlocal.com @accoyleWL

Monday

Dec 31, 2018 at 3:30 PM

It’s a night to celebrate the waning hours of the year with friends and family, noisemakers and a glass of bubbly for that midnight toast. Millions will tune in to televisions at parties, restaurants or in their own living rooms and count down to the ball drop in Times Square and the start of 2019. As you jot down those resolutions and ready to raise that flute of champagne Dec. 31, here are a few more New Year’s Eve facts to sip on.

1. New Year’s Eve plans. Fewer people than you’d think plan to party on Dec. 31. According to a WalletHub survey, 24 percent of Americans will spend NYE at home and another 3 percent don’t celebrate the holiday at all. Fifteen percent say they’ll spend the evening at a friend’s house or attend a public event like Boston’s First Night, and 9 percent will ring in the New Year at a restaurant or bar.

2. Making it an early night. Forty-eight percent of parents will count down the last 10 seconds of 2018 with their children at 9 p.m. and 12 percent of Americans will be asleep before midnight on Jan. 1.

3. Finishing in fourth. When it comes to popularity, New Year’s Eve is Americans’ fourth favorite holiday after Independence Day (3), Thanksgiving (2) and Christmas (1).

4. Midnight traditions. Fifty-four percent of Americans say they plan to kiss someone at the stroke of midnight.

Revelers also like to toast the coming year with a glass of bubbly. More than 360 million glasses of sparkling wine will be consumed on New Year’s Eve.

5. Costs of drinking in the New Year. All that sparkling wine can have negative consequences for those without a designated driver. Nearly 41,000 people are injured in car crashes on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and more than 356 are killed. The average blood alcohol level on New Year’s Eve is .094 percent making it the most drunken night of the year. The average cost of operating under the influence is about $20,000.

6. Holiday travel. More than 107 million people plan to travel at least 30 miles from their home for New Year’s Eve, 97.4 million of them by car. Another 6.4 million people will travel by plane, with the most popular destinations Orlando, FL., Anaheim, CA. and Honolulu, HI.

7. NYC the place to be on NYE. The Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration draws more than 1 million spectators, with 175 million Americans tuning in on TV and 1 billion watching worldwide. It takes 294 NYC sanitation workers 12-16 hours to clean up the 1.5 tons of confetti that falls at midnight along with other remnants left behind by the million revelers gathered in Times Square on Dec. 31.

8. Having a ball. The ball drop is the culmination of the NYC New Year’s Eve festivities when a 11,875-pound ball, covered in 2,688 Waterford crystal triangles, sitting atop the roof at One Times Square is lowered down a 70-foot-tall pole in the final seconds of the year. The ball first dropped in 1907 and has been an annual tradition ever since, except two years – 1942 and 1943 – when World War II light restrictions were in place.

9. Singing in the New Year. “Auld Lang Syne,” the song most often sung to bid farewell to the old year and welcome the new, is based on a Scots poem written by Robert Burns in 1788.

Set to the tune of a traditional folk song, the title “Auld Lang Syne” translates to “Long, Long, Ago,” “Days Gone By” or “Old Times” and is a call to remember long-standing friendships. It is also sung at funerals, graduations and at the close of other occasions.